


familiar like my mirror years ago

by darklanguages



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Pre-Overwatch, Sibling Incest, blood as overwrought metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:00:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23166634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darklanguages/pseuds/darklanguages
Summary: Scenes from a life, tinged with blood.
Relationships: Genji Shimada/Hanzo Shimada
Comments: 4
Kudos: 39





	familiar like my mirror years ago

**Author's Note:**

> written for Shimadacest Week 2020 for the prompt 'Red'

1\. 

Hanzo turns his head at the sound of a cry from behind him.

Genji is on his knees on the cobblestones, large eyes filling with tears. Hanzo runs back, picks him up, dusts him off. Genji’s almost a real person now - able to run and play with Hanzo. Before he was just pink and squalling and annoying, not good for anything other than being loud and smelling bad. 

Now Genji is five and follows Hanzo like a puppy, determined to do everything he does. Sometimes this is flattering, sometimes it’s frustrating. Especially when he’s trying to do the lessons that their father orders, and Genji just gets in the way.

Today’s one of the better days, though, just running around the garden and watching the flower blossoms float on the spring breeze. There are pink petals stuck to Genji’s chubby knees, that Hanzo carefully peels off.

The petals are stained with red, the same red that is leaking slowly from scratches in Genji’s soft skin. Hanzo plunks himself on the ground, a frown on his young face. He carefully licks a finger, wipes the blood away and rubs it into his other hand until it disappears.

He looks up at Genji, at the fat tears making their way down his round cheeks. “We’re gonna put pants on you, and you need to wear them for the next couple of days, okay?”

Genji sniffles, a loud, wet sound. “Why? It’s hot. I don’t like being hot.”

There’s only three years between them, and Hanzo at eight doesn’t have to vocabulary to explain that their father will look at his damaged child and go quiet and cold. He can’t tell a five year old that it’s okay when they get hurt during lessons because that’s what’s supposed to happen and will make them stronger, but getting hurt outside is something they Cannot Do.

So Hanzo wipes away Genji’s tears with soft fingers that are already developing callouses, and uses the liquid to clean off the last of the blood from his knees. He gets up, uses a sleeve to dry Genji’s face, and takes his hand to lead him into their room to get changed. 

We can get ice cream after, he says. That’ll cool you down. Genji smiles, because Hanzo is the best brother in the world.

2.

Hanzo watches the water circle around the drain. First red, dark and thick and barely dissolved. Then pink, then finally clear. 

It repeats the cycle as he shifts, lets the shower hit different parts of his chest. It’s worse when he turns around, lets the water cascade over the scratches there. Worse when he parts his legs and braces himself against the wall to let the water do its painful work.

When he opens the curtain Genji is there to hand him a towel. The towel is white, but not for long as Hanzo dries himself off and cuts reopen. 

“What happened?” Genji’s eyes are too old for his face, but isn’t that how it goes, when you’re a Shimada?

“Training,” Hanzo answers shortly. He turns without thinking, lifts the towel to dry his hair.

“Hanzo.” It’s just a breath, soft with worry, with shock. “What happened.”

He wants to think it’s just the marks on his back that has Genji worried, but Hanzo glances in the mirror to see Genji’s eyes focused lower.

When muscles are used infrequently and brutally, they’re not very good at being muscles. To his shame Hanzo feels a drip down his inner thigh. He doesn’t know if it’s white or red or both, he wipes it away without looking.

“You can’t let him -”

“Shut up.” The words and tone are harsh, but apparently not harsh enough for as Hanzo looks in the mirror and meets Genji’s eyes he sees - pity.

Damn him for a hundred things but for that most of all.

A ripple of heat runs over his skin, a moment of pure rage that Hanzo takes a deep breath and pushes down. He just doesn’t understand, will hopefully never understand.

If it’s Hanzo, it’s not Genji. 

And he’ll keep it that way as long as possible.

3\. 

Hanzo watches in the mirror as Genji stares at his arm. His eyes are bright as he carefully smooths moisturizer into the newly inked flesh. The stormy blues and muted yellows are puffy at the edges, the freshly tattooed skin sensitive and swollen.

He pauses, traces a finger along the curve of the dragon’s back. Blood beads up, turning the scales from blue to dark red. “Is it supposed to still be bleeding?” he asks, curious.

Hanzo shrugs with his other shoulder. He doesn’t like thinking about the process, the fasting and the incense and the ancient old man armed with a bamboo stick, a sharpened needle, and pots of vibrant, strange-smelling ink. He’s reasonably sure he hallucinated during the hours and hours under the needle, prays that hallucinations is what they were because he doesn’t like to think about the alternative.

Genji’s finger hovers over the blood for a long moment until he blinks and reaches over to grab some gauze. He wipes up the blood, bright against the white cotton. Then it’s more moisturizer, smoothed in with fingers that spend enough time rubbing that it moves from care to caress.

He moves over, sits on the futon behind Hanzo. Muscles tense as Genji massages Hanzo’s skin, and Hanzo can feel when his long, clever fingers from from the tattooed flesh to the normal, bare skin of his shoulder.

He swallows hard, clears his throat when nails scratch gently over his shoulderblade. “Genji.”

A puff of warm air across his naked back. “You’re too tense, anija.” 

That he is, especially when Genji is acting like this. Hanzo stands, turns his head to the side just slightly to say, “Thank you for the help,” before walking carefully out of the room. 

He doesn’t turn around, afraid of what he might see in Genji’s face. Afraid of what Genji might see in his. 

4.

Hanzo washes his hands over and over. He was wearing gloves, he was in the next building over, there’s nothing to wash away.

He still washes again and again until the callouses crack and dry.

When he strips, his jacket comes off first, followed by the shirt and tactical pants and holsters - all in shades of dark grey. It feels like all he wears nowadays, doing this service or that for the clan in the dark of night. Sojiro expects Hanzo to be the face of the next generation during the day and then carry out his bidding in the shadows. 

Hanzo is holding himself together with spit and glue and caffeine, and he doesn’t know how much longer he can do it.

Down to skintight compression shirt and tights, Hanzo looks at himself in the mirror that takes up one wall of his room. His hair, cut short now, is lank around his face from sweat and the balaclava he’d had on. In the darkness of the room, Hanzo disappears. There is nothing to him but hands and feet and face, the rest of him fading back into the night.

It seems strangely appropriate. Hanzo hasn’t felt like a real person for years now.

As he runs a hand through his hair, the door behind him slides open. Hanzo looks up into the mirror, catches his brother’s eyes. 

“I’d like to say something about cats and dragging, but I doubt you were doing anything even as fun as that,” Genji says, slinking closer.

He’s in his usual evening outfit, all leather pants and tall boots and shirt that’s more hole than fabric. Genji’s in between dye jobs at the moment, so his hair is as dark as Hanzo’s. 

Hands, strips of pale belly, long throat and makeup-smeared face. Genji has as little showing of himself as Hanzo does.

“Don’t you have some scandal to get into?” Hanzo says without heat. It’s not that he’s given up on Genji, at this point he’s happy that at least one of them is somewhat free from the clan’s tightening fingers.

Genji steps closer. He’s taller than Hanzo in his boots, and he hooks his chin over Hanzo’s shoulder to look at them in the mirror. Their faces are so similar, but life is starting to alter them into different people, different shields they show the world.

“It looks like that’s what you were up to tonight,” Genji murmurs, inches from Hanzo’s ear. He slides his arms around Hanzo’s waist and Hanzo stills.

Hanzo looks up to meet Genji’s eyes in the mirror. His own pupils are large in the dim light but Genji’s have taken over his irises - black pools of spreading ink that Hanzo wants to look away from but it feels like he’s drowning in them.

“Genji,” he says, but it’s softer than he means it to be.

They don’t move for long minutes, aside from chests that have synched their breathing up. Hot fingers press against Hanzo’s lower stomach, the thin fabric of his shirt feeling like it’s not there at all. 

Hanzo doesn’t know how long they would have stayed there if there hadn’t been slow movement, a lazy drip of wine-dark liquid down from Genji’s nose. 

Genji reaches up, wipes the blood away with a finger. He examines it for a moment before painting it on his lips, full and rouged. Before Hanzo can react to any of it, Genji leans over, presses a kiss to his cheek.

The lip print stands out red and lurid, a color lipstick could only dream of being. 

Genji just barely moves back, lips and breath stirring the edge of Hanzo’s beard. The moment stretches, until Hanzo turns and breaks away from Genji’s embrace. 

He strips his shirt off, tosses it in the hamper. Turns and seems almost surprised to see Genji still there, lips still stained and parted.

“Go to bed, Genji. Or whatever you do this time of night.”

Genji takes a step forward, and there’s the smallest movement in his hips that speaks volumes, but he’s stopped by Hanzo’s voice.

“No. Not when you’re like this.” 

Genji stops, meets Hanzo’s eyes once again. It’s not a no, not really. It’s a not now. He nods just once, and sashays his way out, closing the door quietly behind him.

When Hanzo wakes in the morning there’s a stain in the shape of Genji’s mouth on his pillow.

5.

Hanzo doesn’t like fucking on his back.

It’s too intimate, having to face his partner. As much as Hanzo has learned to steady his face over the years he still is as subject to the rules of pleasure as anyone, and doesn’t like the loss of control. 

He’s learned to get good at making himself tempting. Learned how to press his chest to the bed, to have his ass in the air and spread, to get the exact right curve of spine that says _just like this._ Lessons learned too early, at first to protect his body and then to protect his heart.

Genji, of course, cares for none of that. He cares for how how Hanzo feels, of course - but Genji’s own wants come first and he will drag Hanzo along with him until it feels like there was never another option in the first place.

Genji wants to press every long, writhing inch of himself to Hanzo’s flesh, wants to permanently install his face tucked in under Hanzo’s chin, would seal his hips nestled inside of Hanzo’s if he could. Genji wants what Genji wants, and when he is deep in the throes of searching for pleasure Hanzo can’t help but be swept along because Genji is electric, Genji is everything.

Right now Genji is driving himself into Hanzo like he could come out the other side, limbs slick with sweat sliding against each other as Hanzo tries to find a grip. He whispers filth into Hanzo’s neck, the words smeared dark and sticky against the column of his throat. Hanzo tries to catch his breath and tries to get a grip on Genji’s back, his practical short-cut nails scrabbling against damp flesh.

Long fingers wrap around Hanzo where he’s crushed between their bodies and stroke him in time with Genji’s words, in time with Hanzo’s panting gasps. Hanzo’s feet skid on the slippery sheets, unsure if he’s trying to get away or to press closer. 

It’s not like Genji gives him a choice, in the end.

Hanzo writes his pleasure in hot white between their bodies, calligraphy smeared to abstraction as he clutches Genji tighter, tighter. Nails find purchase and tear as Hanzo’s hands close tightly, convulsively. Words get tangled in his throat, come out as meaningless noise as his eyes stare blankly at the ceiling.

Adrenaline and orgasm lose their grip on his muscles slowly, and Hanzo collapses back into the bed as Genji finds his own ending deep within Hanzo’s body. They stay there, trembling limbs slowly relaxing as they mentally, emotionally separate back into two people.

He would never voice it aloud, but it frightens Hanzo sometimes. At how he gives himself over to Genji, at how he can’t keep track of where he ends and his brother begins, at how he loses himself for minutes on end. As someone trained to handle their body and their emotions since childhood, the vulnerability this carves into Hanzo is nothing short of terrifying.

Genji cares nothing for that, cares only about his brother and himself and their being together, forever. He murmurs about doing the work and deserving to be the little spoon after they clean up halfheartedly, tugs at Hanzo’s arms until they’re wrapped around him and his back is curved perfectly to Hanzo’s chest.

Hanzo settles his arms around a waist that seems made for them, and looks down at Genji’s shoulders. At the half-moons of flesh gouged deep until they weep blood. Hanzo kisses the damaged skin, licks it clean. The blood and sweat taste almost the same, though Genji’s blood is sweeter, heavier on his tongue. 

He rests his mouth on the delicate curve of Genji’s neck into spine and stays there. Hanzo drifts off to sleep like that, Genji wrapped around him in soul as Hanzo holds him close in body.

Hanzo still can’t help wondering, as he drifts off, how long he’ll be able to have this.

6.

It’s been a long time since Hanzo has had his own thoughts.

The last time he can recall really feeling like himself was when they announced Sojiro died. Hanzo always found a vague pride in how he has never found pleasure in killing, not like so many in the clan. Looking at Sojiro’s cold, grey face sent a savage thrill of joy through Hanzo, before the realization of what this meant for him trampled it all down.

Hanzo is the puppet of the clan elders, now. He was groomed for leadership, but when there’s fifteen elderly men with forty agendas between them, he spends all his time just trying to keep the peace and keep everything from falling apart.

Well, almost everything.

Because now there are pieces in front of him, pieces that Hanzo doesn’t remember taking apart but there’s a bloody sword in his hands and sweat on his back and tears in his eyes and it must have been him, it had to have been him. 

There’s a set of hands pulling him back and another set taking away his sword and voices saying to clean things up, and Hanzo is numb as they hustle him back to his rooms. They used to be Sojiro’s rooms, his body not even in the ground before Hanzo was told to move into them. 

Even though the mattress and bedding was all replaced, Hanzo sleeps in the armchair. No need to add sense memories to his nightmares.

When everyone is finally gone Hanzo stumbles into the bathroom, shuts and locks the door. He looks at his face, black hair against pale skin, eyes wide and shocky. Everywhere - on his face and neck and clothing, everywhere is dotted and smudged with dried red. 

Hanzo stares at who and what he has become, and the tears that flow down his face streak Genji’s blood over and over until it looks like a mask and he can no longer remember what he looks like.


End file.
